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SUMMARY:Mechanism design for Cloud Computing and Crowdsourcing - Angelina 
 Vidali\, Duke University
DTSTART:20140313T110000Z
DTEND:20140313T120000Z
UID:TALK51483@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Microsoft Research Cambridge Talks Admins
DESCRIPTION:The Internet gives us access to many agents that can help us c
 omplete tasks.  These agents can come either in the form of machines (clou
 d computing) or people (crowdsourcing).  However\, generally these other a
 gents do not provide their services for free\; instead\, they have private
 ly known costs for providing their service.  I will show how auction theor
 y\, and more generally the theory of mechanism design\, in some cases allo
 ws us to allocate the tasks efficiently in a way that benefits all (even i
 f agents are strategic)\, whereas in other cases there are fundamental lim
 itations.\nSpecifically\, in the context of mechanism design for schedulin
 g unrelated machines (as proposed by Nisan and Ronen)\, I prove a lower bo
 und of 1+\\phi on the approximation ratio obtainable by such mechanisms.  
 I also prove several other results for characterizing truthful mechanisms.
   These involve the geometry of such mechanisms and techniques that allow 
 us to transfer characterization results across domains.\nI further study t
 he problem where a task (or multiple unrelated tasks) must be executed\, a
 nd our objective is to minimize the expected sum of the agents' processing
  times\, However\, each agent does not know exactly how long it will take 
 him to finish the task\; he only knows the distribution from which this ti
 me is drawn.  I present the ChPE mechanism\, which is uniquely tailored to
  our problem\, and has many desirable properties including: not rewarding 
 agents that fail to finish the task and having non-negative payments.
LOCATION:Small Lecture Theatre\, Microsoft Research Ltd\, 21 Station Road\
 , Cambridge\, CB1 2FB
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